The invention relates generally to housings for bearings, and more particularly to housings for ball bearings with spherical outside diameters. The bearing industry has long used ball bearings with spherical outside diameters in housings that allow the bearing to pivot within the housing. This is necessary to make up for any misalignment of a shaft using the bearing, which can occur from adjustments necessary during the assembly of the machine or from misalignments of the shaft that occur during the action of the machinery, such as the shaft's bending under loads. Unless the bearing can pivot within its housing in response to misalignment of the shaft, the misalignment is transferred to the bearing and bearing failure will result. The bearing cannot, however, move too loosely within its housing, or vibration and excessive wear will result.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have the bearing mounted in the housing in such a way that there exists a resistance to misalignment of the bearing in the housing, but the resistance is not great enough to stop the bearing moving in the housing in response to excessive misalignment of the shaft. In other words, the housing and bearing should have some torque resistance, but not too much. Accordingly, it can be seen that it is desirable to be able to produce some torque resistance when assembling a bearing within a housing.
Various methods are used to form housings for spherical O.D. ball bearings, but there is no inexpensive and convenient way to form housings with some predictable torque resistance. A cast iron housing with an inside surface machined to conform to the outside surface of the bearing, if the fit is accurate enough, will produce torque resistance. Such a housing, however, requires the production of two machined surfaces, one on the bearing and one on the housing, and the matching of the two. This is not easily done. Ordinarily, a trial-and-error method has to be used. A rough classification of housings and bearings by measuring the surfaces is made, but then many bearings must be tested with many housings until a reasonable torque resistance is obtained from a pair.
The use of materials such as sheet metal to form housings for ball bearings has not generally been successful because of the traditional construction of such housings by building them from two or more components. Such a construction requires the painstaking alignment of the components when the housing is assembled around the bearing. Nevertheless, sheet metal is a desirable material to use in the construction of ball bearing housings because of the strength of the material, its ready availability, and its inexpensiveness.
Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to form housings for spherical O.D. ball bearings that have predictable torque characteristics.
It is another object of the invention to form such housings from readily available sheet metal, which is strong, lightweight and inexpensive.
It is still another object of the invention to form an integral sheet metal housing for spherical O.D. ball bearings with the use of common machine shop equipment.